


The Knight and the Paladin

by Leryline



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Romance, gotta love me some danse, implicit sexual content, spoilers for blind betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 04:50:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9641438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leryline/pseuds/Leryline
Summary: Claire Wright was a lot of things. Lawyer, mother, wife, teacher, survivor, saviour. She was different things to different people, some of whom liked her and some of whom hated her. Love and hate had become disconcertingly similar to her, and she found that she didn’t really mind, so long as neither became a threat. She was a leader, a founder, a scientist, a medic. An engineer. A friend. A favourite.To Paladin Danse, however, Claire Wright was all of those things and more.





	

**Author's Note:**

> one day i'll finish the fuckton of other things i have to write but in the meantime let me wallow in my fave robo boyfriend

Claire Wright was a lot of things. Lawyer, mother, wife, teacher, survivor, saviour. She was different things to different people, some of whom liked her and some of whom hated her. Love and hate had become disconcertingly similar to her, and she found that she didn’t really mind, so long as neither became a threat. She was a leader, a founder, a scientist, a medic. An engineer. A friend. A favourite.

To Paladin Danse, however, Claire Wright was all of those things and more. She was a Knight, a comrade, a confidant. They’d fought together for over a year by the time 2289 arose; during that time they’d grown close both as comrades and friends. At first her outrageous candidness had shocked him; nobody in the Brotherhood was quite as crass as she was, nor were they quite so in command of themselves. Claire Wright, he’d discovered, had time for nobody she did not care about, and had all the time in the world for those she did. He’d learned that family meant everything to her, and that she had the determination of a starving mongrel in chase of a deer. He enjoyed watching her - how she moved, what she said, how she reacted to their circumstances.

Claire was entirely unremarkable. Sometimes  Danse recalled the first time they’d met - she’d been much like any of the skilled fighters of the Commonwealth. She looked ordinary enough: grimy, worn, weathered. Her face was angular and bold-featured, her eyes somehow dark and light all at the same time. He remembered noticing that she was broad across the shoulders and the hips, which struck him as odd, seeing as most poor souls in the Commonwealth were far too familiar with empty stomachs. So despite how unremarkable Claire seemed, he couldn’t help but feel like something was off.

True to his instincts, Claire turned out to be unlike any of the companions he’d had in the past. She was something other than a soldier, something more - she was someone who had the particular ability to make a fire and a few bedrolls feel like something of a home, who was able to make the wateriest of stews taste hearty. His bones felt easier, his muscles a little less sore, and the way he woke her before dawn each morning became a habit of sorts. He watched her dark hair grow longer, her face grow more weathered, her gentle fat turn to muscle, the freckles over her nose growing more pronounced from hours spent in the sun. He watched as she changed from a sweet-smelling vault-dweller into a woman of the wasteland, hardened by the sun and the bracken. Their relationship was one of give and take, all done in silence, unmentioned but acknowledged.

At first Danse had been content with being the Paladin to her Knight. He would mentor her in the way of the Brotherhood, his steely calmness tempering her bitterness at the order’s ideals. She would learn from him, and he from her, until their titles became hollow. When had she become something other than a subordinate? Danse couldn’t even bring himself to deny it; she would help him shave and cut his hair after months roaming the wasteland, she would encourage him to wash when they came across a town, she would feed him when his mind wandered elsewhere. His other comrades had taken care of him - it was necessary - but Claire took another step entirely. Rather than caring for him through words or reminders, she did it through her actions.

The first time Danse became startlingly aware of their bond was when Claire told him about Shaun. She told him about her son with a lump in her throat. Sure, he knew that she was looking for the baby that was stolen from her, but that was it. He didn’t know the details - the intimate ones - and he certainly wasn’t aware of her feelings. They’d been huddled up inside a broken-down old store a few hours south of Boston to escape a storm; he could barely hear her voice over the rain pounding the tin roof. He’d never forget the way her face grew stormy and she fidgeted with the wedding ring on her left hand; Claire never took it off. It was a reminder, she told him with a sad old smile, of everything she’d lost, and of everything she was trying to recover.

“Shaun is my life,” she admitted. “He’s the only link I have back to when I was happy.”

Danse had never heard her speak like that before. She sounded so… sad. A deep sadness that he could feel in the very marrow of his bones; it silenced him, made him unable to speak. He wished he could have comforted her, somehow. But he couldn’t. Claire had wiped her eyes on the back of her glove, sniffled, and turned her face to watch the storm. She said no more after that.

Despite Claire Wright’s tragedies, Danse had never seen her fall. They’d been shot at, grievously injured, stared death clear in the face many times over - despite all of it, Claire had only ever shed a few tears. The time she’d told him about the bombs falling - about Shaun - had been the only time he’d seen the raw sorrow she felt. He couldn’t forget about that. It haunted him like a bad dream, clogging his throat like smoke.

She was a mother. Nearing forty, her body was soft even despite the muscle she’d built. Her face was full of strong angles and deep shadows, beautiful in a tragic sort of way, like the burned pages of a book. Her hands were riddled with veins and scars, though her nails still remained smooth and nickless. Her fingers remained soft even despite their calluses. The wedding ring she wore lay tarnished and heavy on her finger; sometimes she would itch at it in her sleep, and Danse got the urge to remove it. He never did.

One day - when they’d returned to Sanctuary to replenish their supplies - she told him about her life before the bombs. She told him about Nate, and she cried fondly at the memories, a few tears that were easy enough to wipe away with a watery smile. She told him of her other husband - the one before Nate - and the children she’d had by him.

She’d had three little girls, she said. Beautiful things. She told him that they all had her dark hair, her face, her hands. Danse listened as she talked, entranced, his eyes on her lips as they moved. She spoke of them with such joy, even despite their grisly ends. They were all dead too, she told him, and she’d wept, as though only just coming to terms with it. He’d held her, just as he had with Haylen, his fingers on the back of her neck, right over her pulse. After Claire had calmed down she gave Danse’s chest a pat and thanked him. And that had been that.

Nothing could prepare Danse for what happened when Claire returned from the Institute. She’d been gone for hours - each second grated against Danse’s nerves, and only when Ingram barked at him to  _ cut it out  _ did he stop pacing the length of the terminal. He was worried, agitated; Maxson watched him the whole time, eyes narrowed, silent.

And then the reactor had crackled and burst with energy, and Claire fell through space and time to collapse on the platform. Danse’s heart lifted in his chest when he saw her, though his joy was short-lived. The deafening burst of electricity faded, giving way to the most devastated shriek Danse had ever heard in his life. It was worse than the scream of death - different. Claire doubled over on herself, her breathing haggard and her limbs shaking so violently that they could no longer support her, her entire body heaving as she screamed. Ingram was frozen to the spot, shocked beyond movement, but it took only a moment for her joints to kick into gear. She took Claire by her upper arms and lifted her, thinking she was gravely injured; only up close did she see that Claire’s face was wet not with sweat but with tears and snot and saliva. She was beyond crying - she was convulsing, shrieking, sobbing with such strength that her body was no longer in her control. It was the first time Danse had ever seen her like that.

They took her back to the Prydwen to be put under the care of the medics until her episode passed. Surely enough, Claire’s convulsions shallowed once the medics pumped her full of anaesthesia, and her shrieking turned to quiet, deep crying. A few hours after her return to the Prydwen she passed out from sheer exhaustion. She still writhed.

Danse sat by her cot for hours. He shed his power armour and allowed himself to place a hand against her wrist to check her pulse every now and again. The medics had cleaned her up, but her face was still raw, her eyes bruised and swollen and her lip still bleeding from where she’d bitten clean through it. Maxson, at least, had heart enough to allow Danse a few hours reprise from his duties.

“It’s funny,” he told Ingram after Claire was taken to the med bay. His tone implied that nothing was, in fact, funny at all. “He’s of higher rank and yet he follows her around like a dog.”

Ingram scoffed in the back of her throat, her joints hissing as she shifted her weight to gaze down at the churning ocean beneath the ship. “She’s got something about her, Elder. I can’t tell what it is, but it’s something.” And then she gave him a sidelong glance. “Some things just go beyond rank.”

Danse didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. Claire lay shaking and moaning on the cot, her entire body going rigid every few hours. His fingers ached from their lack of movement, and yet he never removed them from her wrist, not once. They became far too familiar with each pore of the skin over her wrist bone. Somehow, he found himself praying. He prayed to everything - to the metal of the walls, to the waves pounding the rocks below, to the half-ruined airport terminal, to  _ anything _ . He just… wanted it to stop. He wanted Claire to stop hurting.

When Claire finally woke some two days later, she was silent. It was… unnerving, not only for Danse, but for everybody. For the medics, who couldn’t figure out why she refused to speak, and to Ingram, who grimly decided that something had happened in the Institute to make her that way. But even with the Brotherhood’s technology, there was no way to make Claire say things she didn’t want to say. Unless, of course, they were to resort to torture, but Danse refused to allow it.

As it turned out, Claire merely needed time to think. It was time Danse was more than happy to give her, though Maxson was hard to placate during it. Ingram had grudgingly agreed to satiate Maxson’s agitation with her plans for their new bots, which seemed just enough to take his mind off the Institute for a little while.

“Paladin,” Claire rasped. She lay on the narrow bed in their quarters, watching as Danse rifled through his footlocker, the keys swinging around his littlest finger.

“Knight.” Danse’s reply was seamless; he turned, looked at her, and rose to his feet. The mattress dipped as he sat down at the end of her bed, one hand braced upon his knee. His eyes were intense and refused to leave hers.

“I need to tell someone,” she begged. He had never heard her beg, not even at gunpoint. But this time her breath rasped through her teeth, her voice tight and dry, her fingers catching his sleeve and  _ holding on _ . “I just need to tell someone.”

He helped her sit up; she leaned heavily against his shoulder.

“My son,” she continued. “I… found him. They had him. I - Danse, they - Shaun isn’t  _ Shaun _ .” Her words tumbled, falling over themselves in disarray, and one of the Paladin’s heavy hands found Claire’s knee and squeezed. It calmed her, and she took a deep breath through her nose. “My son was in the Institute. He’s… sixty. Sixty years passed between him being stolen and me leaving that vault. I… the man I met down there wasn’t my son, Danse. I didn’t recognise him. My son he’s -,” her breath halted again, but she swallowed it down, setting her shoulders. “He’s gone. He’s gone and he’s never coming back.”

The revelation came like a blow to the side of the head for Claire. A moment of clarity encapsulated the silence after she spoke, and once it passed she was crying again, crying and crying and crying into Danse’s shoulder. Again, he held her, and this time she pressed a wet kiss to his cheek and managed a laugh. It was hardly the closure she’d hoped for, but it was closure all the same.

Finding Shaun in the Institute gave Claire the resolve she needed to make her own way. She drew up a report for the Brotherhood, delivered it to Maxson, and he sent both her and Danse to Ingram to help build Liberty Prime, the Proctor’s most ambitious project yet. Between Ingram and Madison Li, Claire had her hands well and truly full. They sent her from one end of the Commonwealth to the other in search of parts, had her building and smithing late into the night with nothing but the crackling radio for company. And then they sent her and Danse in search of the nukes that would make up the final part of Liberty Prime’s arsenal.

“I will wait here until the convoy arrives,” Danse told Claire once they’d secured the shipment of nukes. She looked up at him incredulously.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked with an odd edge to her voice; he nodded, though he didn’t want to leave her any more than she wanted to leave him. With a disgruntled sigh Claire patted his breastplate, shifting her rifle over her shoulder.

That was the last time she saw him.

Claire headed back to the Prydwen alone and gave Maxson and Ingram her report. Danse and the convoy were expected back in the next few days, and while Claire wanted to wait, Ingram had her off on yet another goose chase across the wasteland.

When she returned, Danse was not there. Before she could ask any questions Maxson called her to the flight deck; she knew something was wrong by the grey pallor of his face and the way his eyes were devoid of light. And then, just like that, she told her that Danse was a synth and a traitor and that she was to seek him out and execute him. Claire’s body shuddered and went cold, her insides turning to stone; the only time she’d felt like this was when she’d seen Nate murdered and her son taken.

Maxson’s orders threw a lot of things into perspective. She’d enjoyed flirting with Danse in that typically outrageous way - she enjoyed saying crass things that made him blush, or sentences full of double entendres that left him wondering after her. His stoniness both intrigued and frustrated her, and now that he was gone, she realised that her attraction was deeper than she’d thought it was. She’d seen him out of his power armour a handful of times, and each time she let her eyes wander over him, appreciating the muscle and perfect balance of body fat honed by years of discipline. It heated her. She hadn’t been touched since MacCready, and even then, this was different. What she felt was different.

Claire realised it was love when it was too late. She realised, horrified, that she was in love with Paladin Danse while sitting in a vertibird on her way to kill him. Why was she in love with him?! Of all people, why was she in love with a socially stunted robot who practically lived in a tin can? Her teeth chattered and her hands shook. She was sweating and gripped the side of the vertibird, preparing to be sick over the side if she had to.

The bunker was eerily quiet. She found Danse there, half-naked and entirely vulnerable, his face raw. At the sight of him, Claire dropped her rifle to the concrete and broke down in tears, her body heaving. She wouldn’t kill him - she  _ couldn’t _ .

The way Danse said her name made her heart ache. He called her ‘Claire’ in a voice so haggard that she punched him right across the jaw, shrieking at him that he can’t die, that she wouldn’t  _ let  _ him die, even when he smiled and told her that he was ready for the bullet. He pressed his holotags into Claire’s shaking hands and she’d only cried harder, the metal still warm from his skin.

Danse placed a dry, rough hand against Claire’s cheek, wiping a thumb beneath her eye, smearing her tears. That wasn’t the hand of the Paladin, but the hand of  _ Danse _ , of the man she’d grown to know and love. She gripped his wrist and sobbed, her hands pressed to the warm skin of his chest, and he held her - just held her - allowing her to press her face to his neck as he stroked the hair away from her neck. She’d already lost Nate and Shaun, and she was sure as hell  _ not  _ going to lose Danse as well. So she told him so and refused to let go of his shoulders until he agreed not to die. She screamed at him, voice rattling hoarse, trying to get across that she would have  _ nothing left  _ if he was to die. That, at least, finally seemed to bring him around.

Danse was declared a dead man. Claire held onto his holotags. Their journey back to Sanctuary from Danse’s bunker was tense, though not with aggression. Something else made the air thick, and whenever Claire’s back was turned she could’ve sworn Danse’s hands were inches from her skin. But when she turned, they never were.

She told him she loved him in the shade of the old oak tree that crested Sanctuary’s cul-de-sac. They sat on an old stone bench, Danse looking surprisingly human in a grey flannel shirt and jeans instead of his jumpsuit and power armor. Claire was in a belted blue dress, and if she closed her eyes, she might be able to trick herself into believing that the fallout had never even happened. She told him she loved him while she twisted her wedding band around her finger, and Danse had looked at her and swallowed, watching as she removed the ring from her finger and held it in both hands.

He looked like a nervous schoolboy, she thought. Claire’s hand found his against the sun-warmed stone, the shadow of the budding leaves flickering across her face as she smiled, her eyes crinkling a little at the corners. He smiled back at her, a shy, sure smile, and gave her hand a squeeze.

The next few days appeared - to Claire, at least - to be some sort of bizarre courting ritual. It was like she was a teenager again; she sat with Danse at the bar, trying her best not to blush under Marcy’s scrutinising glare, the solid liquor making her bolder. She liked seeing Danse blush, and she fell in love with his clumsy dancing, which she saw for the first time when she insisted he dance with her after installing a new radio in their home (because it was their home, now, not just hers). He brought her whatever junk he thought she might like, knowing that Claire had a tendency to gather shiny things like a magpie, and occasionally brought her flowers if he was fortunate enough to find some.

Danse wasn’t like MacCready had been. There was nothing fast and desperate about the way Claire and Danse touched each other. Hell - for the first few weeks of their ‘official’ relationship, the farthest they went was a soft kiss on the lips. Strangely enough, Claire wasn’t thirsty for any more than Danse was willing to give.

It was the night of a heavy storm when it happened. Claire sat in the darkened bedroom staring out through the windowpane as the rain lashed against the glass; the light from the streetlamp outside was hazy and dim, the hammering of the rain against the roof the constant beat of a drum. It felt clean.

When Danse found her there he didn’t turn on the light. He merely sat down beside her and slid an arm around her waist, pulling her in close enough for him to smell her hair. Claire’s hand found his knee and she turned her face, angling it upwards, and kissed him.

She found out that night that Danse was a virgin. As far as he could remember, anyway. He blurted it out at the last minute when his lips were flushed and his hair rumpled, his shirt half-undone, Claire’s fingers tugging at his belt. She could feel the heat of him. His excitement rose from his body like an electrical field she could feel all the way from her scalp to her toes.

“I don’t mind that you’re a virgin,” she told him, bending down so the collar of her blouse fluttered open. Her eyelids drew low over dark eyes and she smiled a catlike smile. “So long as you don’t mind that I’m not.”

She’d never seen the uptight, disciplined Paladin blush as hard in the entire time she’d known him. She’d never seen his skin rise like that, nor grow as hot as it did beneath her touch; no man had arched so ardently against her before, not like this, not ever. Not Nate, not MacCready, not her ex-husband or anybody she’d spent the night with before. Danse’s entire body heaved beneath her,  _ for  _ her, all rippling muscle and coarse, dark hair. She twisted her fingers in the strands on his chest and tugged, and he sang for her so  _ beautifully _ that it was all she could do not to entirely lose her mind. Both of them were thankful for the storm that night - it muffled them, leaving them free to make all the noise they wanted.

 

* * *

 

Claire woke the next morning to Danse fingering the stretch marks on her belly.

He cushioned his head on his arm, his nose skimming her waist, her arm tucked neatly around his broad shoulders. His touch was… almost impossibly gentle as he traced the faint breaks in her skin, where the membrane tore for the sake of bringing a new life into the world. Claire had always been particularly self-conscious about those marks; after giving birth to four children her body was beginning to show the strain. Thankfully for her, at least, pregnancy had always come and gone relatively easily due to her wide birthing hips. But even the respite her frame gave her did not spare her skin.

She had more scars, now. Before the bombs fell she only had a single scar on the underside of her chin from where she’d tumbled from a tree when she was ten. Now, though, she had scars in many places, including a still healing one right over her eyebrow. Unlike her stretch marks, Claire wasn’t conscious of these ones. She liked the way they shone silvery once fully healed.

“Thank you,” Danse murmured against her navel, kissing it as Claire ran her fingers through his hair. The strands were coarse between her fingers, his scalp warm. “For everything you’ve done for me.”

Claire managed a low chuckle. “You say that as though you’ve given me nothing in return,” she told him, a little dreamily. He rose to his hands so he could look down at her, passing his hand down the gentle curve of her jaw to rest over the hollow of her throat where his holotags lay. She never took them off.

One spring morning Claire decided to give Danse a gift. She was incredibly nervous, but with Piper’s encouragement she managed to steel her nerves enough to approach him as he was finishing up fixing one of the turrets with Sturges.

“This is for you,” she said gently as she pressed the little leather pouch into Danse’s hands. “A gift.”

Danse tipped the contents of the pouch into his palm; the ring looked startlingly small sitting between his fingers, and Claire doubted it would even fit on his pinky. Thankfully she’d suspected as much, and had linked it through a chain similar to the ones that held Danse’s holotags. Recognising it immediately as Claire’s wedding ring from before the war, the Paladin stiffened.

“You gave me your tags,” Claire explained quickly, anxiety twisting and knotting in her gut. “I… wanted to give you something in return. Something special… something that would remind you of me.” Christ, now she was blushing - how unsightly.

But just as she was about to take it all back and run off to hide, Danse raised the chain up and over his head without a word, settling the ring against his chest. He held it there for a moment, chin bowed, turning it between his fingers. And then he looked up at her and  _ smiled _ the sweetest goddamn smile Claire Wright had ever seen. He touched her face and the tags she kept beneath her collar.

“I love you,” he told her quietly, and quite suddenly Claire felt as though she’d never be able to breathe again.

And honestly, so long as Danse was by her side, she wouldn’t really mind.


End file.
